Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places

True work is done for the sake of doing it. What is to be done with it afterwards is another matter, another job.

Being human isn’t something people can bring off alone; we need other people in order to be people. We need one another.

That our society devalues it is evidence of the barbarity, the aesthetic

Mr. Hudson’s summary of the material is elegant, and his interpretation of it is, I take it, Freudian. Dreamwork is rationalization, therefore it is falsification: a cover-up. The mind is an endless Watergate. Some primitive “reality” or “truth” is forever being distorted, lied about, tidied up. But what if we have no means of access to this truth

A culture or a psychology predicated upon man as human and woman as other cannot accept a woman as artist.

Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.

If the attempt to provide a structure that will ensure communitas is impaled on the horns of its own dilemma, might one not abandon the machine model and have a go at the organic—permitting process to determine structure? But to do so is to go even further than the Anarchists, and to risk not only being called but being in fact regressive, politica

We’re supposed to be talking about world-making. The idea of making makes me think of making new. Making a new world: a different world: Middle Earth, say, or the planets of science fiction. That’s the work of the fantastic imagination. Or there’s making the world new: making the world different: a utopia or dystopia, the work of the political imag

When we look at what we can’t see, what we do see is the stuff inside our heads. Our thoughts and our dreams, the good ones and the bad ones. And it seems to me that when science fiction is really doing its job that’s exactly what it’s dealing with. Not “the future.”